In our latest Author to Author interview, Chelsea Biondolillo and Heidi Czerwiec get deep about the structural elements of their work: how poetry informs prose, braiding essays, visual essays and more. It’s an English major’s dream of a conversation!

Chelsea Biondolillo: Heidi, I was so struck by the decisions you made regarding form in Fluid States, and specifically the way you have applied different poetic forms to your essays. I will admit that before I read your book, I read your craft essay on the subject and as a direct result, tried to write the very last essay in my own book as a sestina. I failed miserably at the essay-as-sestina format in the very first draft, but bless you, because at least my pen was moving and eventually I got a strong non-sestina essay out of the experiment, but at one point it seemed a Herculean task.

How does this process play out on the page for you? Does form come first, and then content, or is it vice versa? I’m thinking of the series of short pieces in the section Decant, written in haibun form, but also the sonnet cycle, SWEET/CRUDE: A Bakken Boom Cycle. Did you assign yourself the haibun or sonnet, or did the shape of early drafts suggest those forms?

Heidi Czerwiec: Chelsea, I’m so glad that prose sestina form got you writing! I usually don’t put form first except as a way of forcing myself to put words on the page, like you did. Normally, my process begins with content, and then I find the form that pairs with it.

I know I’ve said this elsewhere, but I come to nonfiction from writing poetry, a lot of it in received forms. I tend to think of form the way Roethke did, as suitable for different kinds of content. When I was writing Decants, the opening sequence about perfume, I wanted to link them more visually, and the haibun form seemed like a good choice. The haiku part of the lyrical prose haibun captures both the ephemeral spirit of perfume, and its distillation. With “SWEET/CRUDE,” I was struggling to focus on any one issue facing the Bakken oil region of western North Dakota, because all the issues were important and interlocking and complex. I thought about interlocking forms — and at one point, I considered a prose sestina! — but hit on the heroic crown of sonnets (though written in prose), which I remembered my friend Lynn Kilpatrick attempting in grad school (shout-out to her for the idea). Once I started playing with that form, it felt like the piece wrote itself fairly quickly. I wrote out all the topics I wanted to address onto index cards, looked at points of contact where one issue morphed into another (like increased road traffic and increased drug/sex trafficking), shuffled the cards around on the floor. Those points of contact became the repeated ending/beginning sentences, and I knew it had clicked when I could put those fourteen sentences in an order that made sense for the fifteenth “key” sonnet.

So, I grabbed my copy of The Skinned Bird to see if I could trace the ghost of sestina in “Zugunruhe (Migration) II,” and while I don’t see specific end words repeated, there’s a lot of patterning going on: in Emlen’s experiments with migrating birds, in the behavior of his and wild birds, and in your own patterns of moving and leaving. I love how patterned language can either impose or reveal order in chaos. More rigid structures like what I chose are easier — my beginning poetry students never believed me when I said free verse is more difficult to write because you have to create your own form without a ready-made scaffold. You reveal in a couple essays that you at one point wrote poetry, and I definitely see forms and patterns in your own essays. I’d love to hear more in particular about the structure of “Zugunruhe (Migration) II” and “Critical Learning Period,” which seem like braided essays, a form I’m fascinated by but am less confident in. What was your process for writing these two, or for writing this kind of essay? Do you know in advance that a piece will be a braid, or do you notice separate pieces that seem to be speaking to each other and might benefit from apposition? Do you write each “braid,” then cut them up and shuffle them together? Do you write on one “braid” until you hit a resting point, then shift gears?

CB: I grabbed the notebook I was working in during the early drafts of Zugunruhe II (which was the last essay I wrote for the book). My original sestina words:

Next to the list, I have a post-it where I wrote out the pattern: ABCDEF, FAEBDC, CFDABE, etc. The rest of the page is blank, because that level of rigor became intimidating very quickly! I’ve kept the post-it though, because someday I’ll try again.

Often when I sit down to write, what bubbles up takes the form of fragments–sensory details or snippets of scene. I usually have an idea of some kind in mind—in that last essay it was two-fold, my editor had asked for a “tighter ending,” and I wanted to draw a couple of threads together from the rest of the book. Those two ideas inspired the first few fragments. I also remembered the night sky experiments I reference from their brief mention in a graduate class in ornithology: that tragic image of a bird thrashing against the west side of a cage, even if its never been outside! I knew this longing for a sense of direction, well. So, I looked up the experiments and read a bit about Emlen and his father, which gave me some more fragments, and then I started to try and piece the two sets of fragments together to see what else was needed to make it work. Sometimes this is a very physical activity—Critical Learning Period got cut up a few times and taped back together, other times I can get the rhythm of a piece earlier in the drafting.

In graduate school, a famous visiting writer read one of my earlier bird essays, on a hummingbird banding in southeastern Arizona, and very off-handedly said, “So, I get it, you’re the hummingbird and all but I think you might want to…” and I have no idea what else he said because I was so mortified that I was melting into the chair cushions like a sad sidewalk ice cream cone. In the moment, I just nodded, but for days after, I stormed and sputtered, “I am not the hummingbird!” to my houseplants and closest friends. I can laugh about it now, because it turns out those words were deeply galvanizing, but at the time it felt like I’d been called a walking cliché. All the braided essays in this book very much came after that conversation, when I was finally grown enough to say, “Well damn, I guess I was the hummingbird all along.”

The braided essays in TSB tend to take two disparate elements (song acquisition in birds / my parent’s divorce for example) and weave a single moment from them, but in Fluid States, you deal with disparate elements across the essays–from perfume to fracking to toilet seats to the harrowing consequences of a voicemail. How did you decide what went into the book and what stayed out? Were there other versions of the manuscript?

HC: I love that story — you are the hummingbird! It’s very humbling when our essays and readers reveal us in ways we don’t realize, or don’t realize until later.

I’m interested in this idea of potentially disparate elements, both in terms of how they get braided together, how different mediums get employed, how disparate subjects get grouped into the same manuscript. Fluid States is my first nonfiction prose book, and it’s very much a collection of essays rather than a sustained meditation or argument on a unified subject. To be honest, I had a file folder in my computer of “Miscellaneous Essays,” and I realized I had enough page count for a manuscript (at least, for publishers working on the shorter side), so I tried putting them together. I had the same reaction that you did — do all these disparate subjects belong in the same book? Despite the range of topics, I strongly felt that the form and the voice were unifying. The speaker is a specific intelligence dipping in and out of these topics. I would also argue that there’s a feminist perspective to these pieces, engaging with the ways industries and institutions and behaviors are policed and controlled by men (oilfields, perfume, marriage, higher ed, online spaces). And the lyric hybrid prose, with its particular attention to language and form, is consistent across these essays.

But could I make these arguments evident to a reader? It wasn’t until I hit on the title, Fluid States, that I thought that framing worked — it encompassed some of the literal subjects (perfume, oil, canning tomatoes) and volatile situations (end of marriage, online outrage), but also the lyric prose forms. My only hesitation with that title is that I worry it suggests gender fluidity, and while that is addressed briefly in a few of the perfume pieces, and while I myself am bisexual, that’s not the primary focus of this-book-which-has-no-focus, so I don’t want potential readers to feel duped.

So: everything went into the book. There really weren’t alternate versions of the manuscript. Fortunately, the manuscript found its perfect editor, because this disparate-topics-linked-by-lyricism is very much Kathryn Nuernberger’s aesthetic sensibility, and I’m lucky she snagged it at the end of her tenure at Pleiades Press.

Your book seems to be the inverse of mine: more unified subjects/content, but widely disparate forms, many of which are visual. In fact, I’m exhilarated by the possibilities of form you raise in your collection. “With this Ring,” “Meteorology,” and the pieces that comprise the sequence “Enskyment” are paired with photographs that serve as illustration, and the two “Zugunruhe” pieces chart movement or migration attempts. But the two visual forms I’m most enthralled by are the one you use for “Phrenology” and “Pyrology,” which incorporate personal essay, text blocks the essay wraps around, and footnotes, and “The Story You Never Tell” (which seems a clever take on a common CNF prompt), an essay largely obscured by identically-sized image blocks depicting shells against a black background, images that allow only tantalizing glimpses at the story not being told (or shown).

Can you talk about the choices you made in writing visual essays? Were you concerned it would limit or eliminate publishing opportunities? Now that you’re giving readings from the book, do you read these visual essays aloud, or do they only exist or work on the page?

CB: I like the idea of content fluidity that Fluid States suggests, and I definitely felt a cohesion coming from your own voice, which is something I worried about in my own collection, since the pieces in The Skinned Bird play with form, as you mentioned, and voice a fair bit—from the dispassionate taxidermist to the jealous 10-year-old, and several points between.

Art-making has always been part of my creative practice and I have struggled for all my creative life with whether or how to mix text and image. In art school, the text was secondary (and often considered a distraction by my teachers) and in my MFA the images were secondary–I snuck them in to my final bound thesis copies and very little was said of them at my defense. It’s often frustrating and I’d be lying if I said that “what I think readers / viewers can handle” wasn’t part of my process. That means that sometimes I use images in expected ways, like the photos of my hands in With this Ring and the diagrams in Meteorology and the Zugunruhes–these are most like “illustrations”–and other times, I think about how the two elements might amplify one another.

Most of my attempts to incorporate text and words have failed to land (my 2017 chapbook #Lovesong is notable as an exception, but its reach remains very modest)—from hand-sewn books in precious boxes, to photos of text on surfaces, to scribbled text over life drawings… readers and viewers are often perplexed and so I’m glad the experiments in TSB are resonating with folks. This book was hard to place and the feedback I get now is deeply validating. Many of the (years worth of) rejections that I got for prior versions of the book were encouraging, but at the heart of most of their concerns was that no one knew how to market it. I knew it wouldn’t ever be mass-marketable, but I imagined that an audience of some kind was out there for it. Eventually though, after about four years of submitting it to large and small contests and reading periods, I gave up. I put it away and tried to move on, and I failed at that, too (which is another story entirely) Then, Jesi Buell at KERNPUNKT, known for its experimental catalog, asked to see what I had, and I was like, screw it, I’m throwing all the weird stuff in. She loved it. (Though for the record, The Story You Never Tell was added after acceptance. I had to pull two pieces that contained color photos, one of which is still looking for a good home, for cost reasons, and TSYNT was added in place of one of them. I was holding my breath after hitting send on that draft, but she was as excited about it as I was.)

Blocking out nearly all the text in that essay is definitely the boldest move in the book, and one that not everyone has loved, but I feel such a sense of satisfaction when I look at that piece, that I can’t imagine it being in print any other way. Some of the early readers of the un-shelled version of that essay have expressed some sadness that it will live under those black boxes, but that doesn’t mean no one will ever know what’s in there. I just did my first reading at Powell’s City of Books here in Portland a couple of weeks ago, and Powell’s is such a literary landmark–and not just to teenage me who loved spending hours picking out books there, but to book lovers all over–that I wanted to make it special, so I read from The Story You Never Tell. It was a good experience, and I could see myself doing it again.

On the subject of subverting expectations, you mentioned the feminist perspective that threads through your collection, and I especially felt the power and agency disparity in the situation you recount on your campus in “Anatomy of an Outrage,” your narrator engages fiercely in this case, and I imagine that many folks at the university would have preferred that you note memorialize this incident. Doesn’t writing the essay becomes a secondary feminist act, in that sense, then? And too in the Bakken piece, there is urgency and a call to act. Do you consider these pieces forms of activism? Much like the fine line between obliterating too much text, do you think that there could be too much activism in a lyric essay? I struggle with this question a lot myself, and so I don’t know how I’d answer, but what do you hope your essays to do in the world?

HC: “The Story You Never Tell” almost wasn’t part of this book! And you read from it at Powell’s! I am screaming with delight, and also furious I live across the continent and couldn’t be there to hear/see how you accomplished this. Your visual hybrid style continues to fascinate me, especially since — with a past in both music performance and poetry — my work is very sound-based, which makes it quite conducive to giving readings.

I absolutely consider “Anatomy of an Outrage” and “Sweet/Crude” to be forms of activism. I think the lyric mode — in these two, as in your own work, especially “Phrenology” (another piece I would love to know if/how you read aloud) — is uniquely suited to activist art. There definitely can be too much activism in essays if the didactic mode is used — people don’t like being told what to believe/think/do. But the lyric mode in the essay is subversive: the form is short, so it’s not too intimidating; the prose has a momentum that moves the reader through; the lyric language delights and possibly disorients with its music and compressed imagery. All of these effects combine to allow the activist message to fly quickly under the reader’s radar without being weighed down by the didactic. I’ve had so many readers of “Sweet/Crude” say they had no idea about the various ways the Bakken was experiencing trauma to its land and people, that it made clear how fossil fuels don’t just magically appear in the gas pump, and I’m so glad and so grateful that sequence could accomplish that. My guess would be that your own hybrid work, with its extra layer of visual poetics, creates yet another way to delight the reader while subversively conveying its activist message.

I’ve been thrilled with the opportunity to consider our two collections alongside each other. There are such interesting parallels — how we incorporate and transform research into lyric essays, an obsession with the details of something and wanting to understand it from the inside out, the ends of marriages, even the use of compound German words! But there are also key differences, where we each took an inverse approach to our material, that are illuminating. I’ve enjoyed and learned from our conversation, and hope it’s provided others with ways to think about lyric/hybrid essay collections.

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Chelsea Biondolillo is the author of The Skinned Bird and two prose chapbooks, Ologies and #Lovesong. Her essays have been collected in Best American Science and Nature Writing, Waveform: Twenty-first Century Essays by Women, How We Speak to One Another: an Essay Daily Reader and others. She is currently an Oregon Literary Arts fellow in nonfiction and holds a BFA in photography from the Pacific NW College of Art and an MFA in creative writing and environmental studies from the University of Wyoming. She lives and works outside of Portland, Oregon, in a house her grandparents built.

 

Essayist and poet Heidi Czerwiec is the author of the recently-released lyric essay collection Fluid States, selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, and the poetry collection Conjoining, and is the editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets. She writes and teaches in Minneapolis, where she is an Editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies and for Poetry City. Visit her at heidiczerwiec.com